Media Inquiries: 310-317-5321
Technical Contact: Joel Schulman, 310-317-5085
LOS ANGELES, June 29, 2006 — HRL Laboratories, LLC has been awarded a $1.73M 18-month Phase II contract option from the Microsystems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue to develop inexpensive passive millimeter-wave imaging array technology. The Phase I goal was to distinguish a 20-degree Kelvin resolution within a scene, but HRL achieved a remarkable 5-degree resolution. The results were verified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colorado, the DARPA-designated measuring facility. The goal for Phase II is 2-degree resolution.
The award is under the "Microantenna Arrays: Technology and Applications" program. Under the contract, entitled "W-Band Backward Diode Microantenna Arrays," HRL plans to develop and demonstrate a low-cost, high-sensitivity imaging array of microantennas and detectors in a focal plane array structure without radio frequency (RF) amplification. Intended applications of such technology include concealed weapons and explosives detection, aircraft obstacle avoidance and landing in fog/clouds, smoke, dust and sand, fire hot-spot location through smoke, missile guidance, and military personnel extraction.
The HRL approach is based on a novel antimonide-based semiconductor millimeter-wave detecting diode, and on an inexpensive high-yield fabrication process. The resulting device is an innovative detector diode that replaces the commonly used Schottky diode. The main advantage is that unlike Schottky diodes that require a constant bias voltage to boost sensitivity, the HRL diode requires none. Since noise (1/f and shot) increases dramatically with bias, the HRL diode is orders of magnitude less noisy, eliminating the need for an RF amplifier to boost the incoming signal above the detector noise level. The exceptionally low noise behavior is the key to achieving high quality imaging without expensive and power consuming RF low noise amplifiers, greatly reducing the cost of the array as a whole and moving useful high-resolution passive millimeter-wave cameras closer to reality in the near future.
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HRL Laboratories, LLC is a corporate R&D laboratory owned by Boeing and General Motors. HRL provides R&D services for its LLC Members, for the U.S. government, and for other commercial entities.
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